Advertising framed: An exploratory study of advertising frameworks in financial service advertising

The advertising frameworks developed by Hall and Maclay (1991) and Franzen (1994) can be seen as capturing the strategies used most frequently by today’s advertisers. Although based on extensive practical experience, their empirical basis has hardly been touched upon in academic research. To answer the question to what extent the advertising frameworks exist in practice, the authors conducted an exploratory study signifying the presence of such models. Based on an analysis of 16 commercials from the four largest Dutch banks (N = 1101), some frameworks proved to be more ’popular’ than others were. While for each bank a dominant framework could be identied, different banks employed different models. Within Financial Service Advertising, characteristics of the frameworks were found to affect the effectiveness of a campaign in different ways, sometimes facilitating one effect while impeding another. Also, more general content characteristics with regard to brand name and type of endorsement were found to signicantly influence advertising effectiveness.